A Bao

A Bao is a Miao woman, Miao name "Baoligei," Han name Li Yuchun, born in 1968 in a poor Miao village in southeastern Guizhou. She attended school only to the second grade and dropped out because of poverty and her stepmother's opposition, so she is nearly illiterate. This book is her own account: she spoke what she wanted to say into a phone, had the speech converted to text, then copied it out character by character into notebooks, and with the encouragement of her partner Pan Nianying (Brother Pan) began writing in 2018, completing it over several years. The book records the bustle of most of her life: the family upheavals after her mother's death in her childhood, going to the city as a nanny in her teens, marrying in a daze, raising two daughters, working odd jobs to support the family; being trafficked at a job market, taken into a shelter on the way back, and finding on her return that her husband had already found a "new person"; spending all her savings several times to put her daughters through school and to treat family illnesses; later working as a care worker, domestic worker, and nanny, being the victim of telecom fraud and bullied, remarrying after her husband's death, and still helping raise her grandchildren when she was too old to work. The whole book tells of her "cattle-like fate" in plain colloquial language: she writes her experience so that her daughters and granddaughters will know what their mother and grandmother went through in this life, and she hopes they will not suffer the hardships she suffered. She does not complain about heaven or blame others; she simply grits her teeth and, holding to the belief that "I must live," gets through one difficulty after another. The Dong scholar and writer Pan Nianying, who once employed her, later became her partner and first reader; he comments in the book that the work is both a personal life history and a field record of the fate of lower-class people in the era of reform and opening up.